Whereupon I make more hummus, then eat it with “Smartfood Selects”

Posted on Sep.17,2012

So hummus is pretty darn tasty, and considering how successful my last attempt at hummus was, I figured I’d give it a whirl again, this time by making my own beans.

For awhile I thought that chickpeas and garbanzo beans were totally different things. But, unless Wikipedia is lying to me, they’re exactly the same. Anyhow, I really had no clue how many beans to make for my hummus, since most of the recipes I’ve looked at just use the beans from the can, so I just guesstimated that a cup would suffice.

I dumped these into a pot along with a bunch of water, let them soak overnight, added more water, and then slow-cooked them for 8 hours or so. Based on my experience with other beans, there’s no such thing as cooking them too long, especially when the end goal is to turn them into mush!

So I got a little cocky this time around. I coulda just followed a recipe like a normal person would, but nope, I decided to freestyle this one. A cup of dried garbanzo beans definitely makes more than your average can – which is pretty awesome pricewise. Not that canned beans are particularly expensive, but a.) I am in general a fan of using dried/fresh over canned and b.) I am a cheap ho. Meaning I’m pretty happy to have a nice supply of dried garbanzo beans to use as I please. Anyhow, these suckers really filled out the ole blender.

I more or less dumped in what I dumped in last time for the rest of the ingredients, with a few additions. Used less tahini than last time, and bumped up both the amount of lemon and garlic. Albeit, I also bumped up the number of beans used, which, in hindsight, I should have thought a bit more about in this process. I also added some water from the beans, olive oil, salt, pepper, and cilantro. Hmm, I think the only new addition to the ingredients was the cilantro, come to think of it. In any case, the ingredients looked like this after all being added:

I blended for about 2 minutes, which was a bit less time then the last batch of hummus. And the results? A little chunkier than before, but a good kind of chunky. A little runny for my tastes – will try to use less water next time. And, next time I need to be better about adding ingredients proportional to the number of beans I used. Coulda used a little more tahini, as well as more salt and pepper. Last one’s easily solved, at least! Hummus was still quite tasty, though, and I’d probably do the “not measuring” thing again. It’s the sort of thing where I’d really like to get the skill of being able to eyeball ingredients to make successful hummus – I might need to do the “taste it between blendings and add more of things accordingly” method.

This’ll blow your mind: I ate the hummus…with hummus-flavored chips! I got this bag of Smartfood Selects for free at the Taste of Colorado festival. And, let’s just say I have mixed feelings about these chips. I actually found them to be really tasty, but I think it’s awful that you’d never know that by looking at the package. The naming is just awful – “Smartfood Selects” sounds like the sort of thing you eat when you’re on a strict diet and want to convince yourself you’re enjoying a snack when you’re really just choking down flavorless styrofoam. Adding “All natural” is just slapping another nutrition buzzword on there. And the “Smart Combinations” circle adds even more overkill. It’s a shame, too, because they’re rather good.

So, take SunChips. They’re pretty darn tasty. Also, more nutritious than regular potato chips. And I bet they’d be completely off the market right now if they’d been named “Smartfood Selects.” Mind you, some of this is just my annoyance at the way some thing are marketed. But still, you can say something is healthy without saying it a gazillion times on a package. OK, rant done!

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